Farmscape for November 22, 2017

Canadian pork producers are expected to begin migrating to a modernized on-farm food safety and animal care assurance program this coming summer.
Producers attending Saskatchewan Pork Industry Symposium 2017 last week in Saskatoon were updated on progress of Canadian Pork Excellence.
Canadian Pork Council Executive Director John Ross says feedback from pilot testing conducted on 73 farms across Canada was positive.

Clip-John Ross-Canadian Pork Council:
We asked producers to score it out of a score of 10 and the average we had across the 73 farms was a 7.1.
The type of feedback that we got was simple stuff, just on phrasing of questions and perhaps grammatical issues, even at that level, we got some comments back.
More importantly we got some information back on technical issues.
This approach might not make the most sense or the way it's explained isn't really the way it is.
We took all of that information on board, resorted out the binder.
We actually got some feedback that we had the sections in the wrong order and if we actually reordered them, they'd make a little bit more sense.
We're now almost at the final part, over the next week to 10 days we'll have a binder finalized and ready to go.
The next step in that is we're going to take that binder back out to producers and we've assembled what we call a peer review committee.
These are producers that largely haven't been involved in the rewrite of the program at all because we wanted to have some fresh eyes, get some fresh perspective on the work that we'd done.
Through December and part of January we're going to be working with that group to get their feedback again on what we think is the final product.
Ultimately I'm thing they're going to have a suggestion or two, a tweak or two, that we can incorporate as we continue to work to make the thing the best product we can make.

A soft launch, where producers can choose to adopt the program early is expected late this coming summer with a formal launch expected January 1, 2019.
For Farmscape.Ca, I'm Bruce Cochrane.

       *Farmscape is a presentation of Sask Pork and Manitoba Pork